Did Human Sacrifice Help People Form Complex Societies? by Laura Spinney (The Atlantic)

The results coming out of Seshat—which have yet to be published—suggest that social control may not be the whole story, however. No society in Pulotu comprises more than a million people, while Seshat includes “mega-empires” whose subjects numbered in the tens of millions. Seshat’s founders therefore argue that it tracks social complexity closer to modern levels, and they find that, beyond around 100,000 people, human sacrifice becomes a destabilizing force. “Our suggestion is that this particularly pernicious form of inequality isn’t sustainable as societies get more complex,” says Whitehouse. “It disappears once they pass certain thresholds, because they cannot survive with that level of injustice.”

Human Sacrifice Was the Key to Social Evolution, New Study Says by Andrew Lasane (Outer Places)

University of Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse and his team have developed a separate database (Seshat) that approaches the subject from a different angle.

Whitehouse says that it is better to cast a wider net and test theories against the data, instead of focusing on data that may already support a theory. Seshat includes data from 400 different historical societies and goes back 10,000 years.

This constantly growing open access database – it can be downloaded for statistical analyses by anybody interested in this field – unites archaeological, historical and anthropological data from more than 30 regions and all kinds of societies worldwide and through periods, beginning with small hunter-gatherer groups and kinships, up to large empires.

Trinity data behind new research which suggests common path governed evolution of societies (Irish Examiner)

Scientific historians, using data collected via a platform developed at Trinity College Dublin, have today published a report suggesting that a single dimension of ‘social complexity’ measures the development of around 400 past societies that existed over the last 10,000 years.

The data used in this project come from the Seshat: Global History Databank, directed by Peter Turchin, Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter Francois, Thomas Currie, and Kevin Feeney.

The Seshat project gathers information from past societies in order to rigorously test different hypotheses about the rise and fall of large-scale societies across the globe, and over the course of human history. Seshat seeks to bring together in one place the largest collection of data on our shared human past that has ever been assembled.

Inequality Through the Ages by Ignatius Barnardt (The Barcelona GSE Voice)

With a view to distinguishing between such rival hypotheses, Prof. Turchin is involved in building a global historical database of cultural evolution, Seshat, with the aim of collating data from diverse sources on the sociopolitical organisation of human societies from the earliest times up to the present.

If you do the maths the history starts to add up by Oliver Moody (The Times)

Seshat, a vast historical data project that is about start turning out its first papers, aims to do the same with a few lines of code. It is, essentially, a giant machine for turning hundreds of thousands of “facts”- where the ancient Britons polythestic? Did the Mayans practise crop rotation?- into models in which researchers can compute how important different factors were in historical events.

The database that is rewriting history to predict the future by Laura Spinney (New Scientist)

Seshat is a vast and growing database of historical and archaeological knowledge that can be explored using scientific techniques. That makes it a powerful tool for testing and ultimately discarding hypotheses. “A cemetery for theories,” is how Seshat co-founder Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut in Storrs describes it. By making history more evidence-based, he and his colleagues hope it will become more relevant.

Trinity big data researchers to lead €4m quality control effort by Dick Ahlstrom (The Irish Times)

Another intriguing project that already involves Dr Feeney and colleagues at Leipzig University relates to the international Seshat Global History Databank project. It has the ambitious goal to bring together everything we know about every human society that ever existed from now back to prehistory.

The project began three years ago and has already assembled 30,000 data points and Dr Feeney serves as the technical editor for the Seshat project.

Seshat News

Data from the Seshat Databank (data.seshat.info) is under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC By-NC SA) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode) licensing. Do you agree to the reasonable and appropriate use of these data?